Green Family Art Foundation
Skip to main content
  • Menu
  • VISIT
  • Exhibitions
  • About
  • Press
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Facebook, opens in a new tab.
Join the mailing list
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Facebook, opens in a new tab.
Join the mailing list
Menu
  • Current
  • Past

Black Abstractionists: From Then ‘til Now: Curated by Dexter Wimberly

Past exhibition
October 8, 2022 - January 29, 2023
  • Works
  • Overview
  • Installation Views
  • Press
  • Press release
Works
  • Alma Thomas, Alma's Flower Garden , 1968-1970
    Alma Thomas, Alma's Flower Garden , 1968-1970
  • Hale Woodruff, Totem, c. 1954
    Hale Woodruff, Totem, c. 1954
  • Charles Alston, Untitled (Cityscape at Night), c. 1950-1955
    Charles Alston, Untitled (Cityscape at Night), c. 1950-1955
  • Beauford Delaney, Waning Light (Abstraction No. 10), 1963
    Beauford Delaney, Waning Light (Abstraction No. 10), 1963
  • Norman Lewis, Aspiration, 1966
    Norman Lewis, Aspiration, 1966
  • Sam Gilliam, Untitled, 1968
    Sam Gilliam, Untitled, 1968
  • Thornton Dial, Looking for the Right Spot, 2004
    Thornton Dial, Looking for the Right Spot, 2004
  • Frank Bowling, Barticaborn I, 1967
    Frank Bowling, Barticaborn I, 1967
  • Ed Clark, Untitled (Paris), 1998
    Ed Clark, Untitled (Paris), 1998
  • Jack Whitten, Untitled I, 1974-1975
    Jack Whitten, Untitled I, 1974-1975
  • Virginia Jaramillo, Untitled, 1969
    Virginia Jaramillo, Untitled, 1969
  • Daniel LaRue Johnson, Untitled, 1971-1972
    Daniel LaRue Johnson, Untitled, 1971-1972
  • Howardena Pindell, Untitled #42, 1974
    Howardena Pindell, Untitled #42, 1974
  • Melvin Edwards, Five to the Bar, 1973
    Melvin Edwards, Five to the Bar, 1973
  • David Hammons, Untitled, 2007
    David Hammons, Untitled, 2007
  • Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Long Ago and Far Away, Age Upon Age, My Tillie, late 1990s
    Mary Lovelace O'Neal, Long Ago and Far Away, Age Upon Age, My Tillie, late 1990s
  • Williams T. Williams, St. Paul, 1970
    Williams T. Williams, St. Paul, 1970
  • McArthur Binion, Under In: And Out of Violet, 1978-1979
    McArthur Binion, Under In: And Out of Violet, 1978-1979
  • Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), 1978
    Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), 1978
  • Glenn Ligon, Figure #43, 2010
    Glenn Ligon, Figure #43, 2010
  • Leonardo Drew, Number 212T, 2021
    Leonardo Drew, Number 212T, 2021
  • Odili Donald Odita, Power of X, 2019
    Odili Donald Odita, Power of X, 2019
  • Mark Bradford, Q2, 2020
    Mark Bradford, Q2, 2020
  • Rick Lowe, Fire #3, 2021
    Rick Lowe, Fire #3, 2021
  • Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 2006
    Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 2006
  • Theaster Gates, A Study in Red 1, 2021
    Theaster Gates, A Study in Red 1, 2021
  • Shinique Smith, Open Secret, 2020
    Shinique Smith, Open Secret, 2020
  • Julie Mehretu, Excerpt (Paradigm), 2003
    Julie Mehretu, Excerpt (Paradigm), 2003
  • Ficre Ghebreyesus, Map / Quilt, 1999
    Ficre Ghebreyesus, Map / Quilt, 1999
  • Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Beyond the veil of the mythical super woman, 2021
    Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Beyond the veil of the mythical super woman, 2021
  • Rachel Jones, SMIIILLLLEEEE, 2021
    Rachel Jones, SMIIILLLLEEEE, 2021
  • Jadé Fadojutimi, My Pathetic Fallacy, 2019
    Jadé Fadojutimi, My Pathetic Fallacy, 2019
  • Gabriel Mills, Qalopsia, 2022
    Gabriel Mills, Qalopsia, 2022
  • Vaughn Spann, A peek through the clouds... New Dawn (Marked Man), 2021
    Vaughn Spann, A peek through the clouds... New Dawn (Marked Man), 2021
  • Reginald Sylvester II, The Prayers of the Slaves are the wings that Carry Us, 2020
    Reginald Sylvester II, The Prayers of the Slaves are the wings that Carry Us, 2020
  • Oscar Murillo, Untitled (Drawings off the wall), 2011
    Oscar Murillo, Untitled (Drawings off the wall), 2011
  • Spencer Lewis, Untitled, 2020
    Spencer Lewis, Untitled, 2020
  • Kevin Beasley, Untitled (Halo Rags), 2019
    Kevin Beasley, Untitled (Halo Rags), 2019
Close
Overview
Vaughn Spann, A peek through the clouds…New Dawn" (Marked Man), 2021. © Vaughn Spann. Courtesy the artist & Almine Rech.
Vaughn Spann, A peek through the clouds…New Dawn" (Marked Man), 2021. © Vaughn Spann. Courtesy the artist & Almine Rech.

Black Abstractionists: From Then ‘til Now, curated by Dexter Wimberly focuses on Black abstract artists spanning multiple generations, starting in the 1960’s with Alma Thomas and ending with young artists working today, such as Michaela Yearwood-Dan and Vaughn Spann. The history of Black artists working in abstraction is inseparable from the history of modern and contemporary art. 

Artists include: 

Charles Alston

Kevin Beasley

McArthur Binion

Frank Bowling

Mark Bradford

Ed Clark

Beauford Delaney

Thornton Dial

Odili Donald Odita

Leonardo Drew

Melvin Edwards

Fred Eversley

Jadé Fadojutimi

Theaster Gates

Ficre Ghebreyesus

Sam Gilliam

David Hammons

Virginia Jaramillo

Rachel Jones

Daniel LaRue Johnson

Norman Lewis

Spencer Lewis

Glenn Ligon

Mary Lovelace O'Neal

Rick Lowe

Julie Mehretu

Gabriel Mills

Oscar Murillo

Howardena Pindell

Shinique Smith

Vaughn Spann

Reginald Sylvester II

William T. Williams

Alma Thomas

Stanley Whitney 

Jack Whitten

Hale Woodruff

Michaela Yearwood-Dan

Share
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Email
Download Press Release
Installation Views
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
  • Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
    Installation view, Black Abstrationists: From Then 'til Now, 2022. Photo: Chad Redmon.
Close
Press
  • Dallas’ Green Family Art Foundation makes a splash with ‘Black Abstractionists’

    Danielle Avram, The Dallas Morning News, January 6, 2023
    This link opens in a new tab.
  • ‘They Become Ways of Telling Stories’: Watch Artist Kevin Beasley Make Thought-Provoking Works From Cast-Off Materials

    Artnet News, January 5, 2023
    This link opens in a new tab.
  • There are six must-see art shows in Dallas and Fort Worth. Make time for them

    D Magazine, December 28, 2022
    This link opens in a new tab.
  • Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas

    Glasstire, December 15, 2022
    This link opens in a new tab.
  • A Visual History Lesson in Color - curator Dexter Wimberly brings Black Abstractionists: From Then ‘til Now to life

    Darryl Ratcliff, Patron Magazine, October 4, 2022
    This link opens in a new tab.
Press release

The Green Family Art Foundation is pleased to present Black Abstractionists: From Then 'til Now, curated by Dexter Wimberly, opening on October 8,2022 and remaining on view until January 29, 2023.

Black Abstractionists: From Then 'til Now brings together a multigenerational group of 38 pioneering, mid-career, and emerging Black artists. The history of Black artists working in abstraction is inseparable from the history of modern and contemporary art. While the older artists presented in this exhibition were often marginalized by the art world power structure of museums, galleries, and collectors for most of the 20th-century, their contributions, in the form of subject matter, innovation and style were inexorable. Initially inspired by the jazz of Black urban life, followed by one of the most radical periods in 20th-century American politics, the Black Power era, Black artists were making abstract art that was powerful, relevant, and salient. The artists that followed created abstract art inspired by the embers of those flames, with a more social conscious and Black community flavor. The current generation has taken these embers and transformed them into a more expanded heat, one that is more personal and revealing.

 

Artists include:

Alma Thomas  Mark Bradford Glenn Ligon
Hale Woodruff Ficre Ghebreyesus Leonardo Drew
Beauford Delaney Odili Donald Odita  Rick Lowe
Charles Alston Julie Mehretu Kevin Beasley
Norman Lewis Shinique Smith Spencer Lewis
Thornton Dial Theaster Gates Oscar Murillo
Jack Whitten David Hammons Reginald Sylvester II
Ed Clark Howardena Pindell Rachel Jones
Sam Gilliam Mary Lovelace O'Neal Vaughn Spann
Frank Bowling William T. Williams  Gabriel Mills
Daniel LaRue Johnson McArthur Binion Jadé Fadojutimi
Virginia Jaramillo Fred Eversley Michaela Yearwood-Dan
Melvin Edwards  Stanley Whitney  

 

A text by curator Dexter Wimberly accompanies the exhibition.

Black Abstractionists: From then ‘til Now

By: Dexter Wimberly

Black Abstractionists: From then ‘til Now brings together a multigenerational group of 38 pioneering, mid-career, and emerging Black artists. The history of Black artists working in abstraction is inseparable from the history of modern and contemporary art. While they were often marginalized by the art world power structure of museums, galleries, and collectors for most of the 20th-century, the contributions of Black artists were inexorable. During one of the most radical periods in 20th-century American politics, the Black Power era, a group of Black artists was working with what was, and still is, one of the most radical forms of art — abstraction. Radicalism is relative, though, and in this case politics and culture were on different tracks.[1]

In America throughout the 1960s — as the civil rights movement crested, calls for Black Power sounded, and the Black Panther Party was birthed — the aesthetics of Black artists became itself a kind of revolutionary proposition. In 1965, after the assassination of Malcolm X, but several months before the passage of the Voting Rights Act (landmark legislation that prohibited racial discrimination in the American electoral process), the poet LeRoi Jones (who would later change his name to Amiri Baraka) founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater School in Harlem — effectively inaugurating the Black Arts Movement. The writer Larry Neal, his collaborator, described the movement’s goal to create art that “speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America,” one objective of which was nothing less than “a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic.” Figurative painting and sculpture were key components in how this reordering took place, and some of the most enduring visuals from the movement were explicitly realist depictions of Black people, their heroes, history, and their activism.[2]

It took courage, focus, self-awareness, and ambition to be a Black artist making abstract paintings at that time. It would seem at that moment that certain Black artists were being backed into a corner: on the one side, they were excluded by mainstream institutions and the prevailing critical establishment, while on the other they were browbeaten by Black art watchdogs demanding adherence to a Black art orthodoxy.[3] The relationship between Black abstraction and Black activism was tenuous and philosophically fraught. White art audiences, including those limited number of galleries, who were willing to inventory, sell, and buy

art made by Black artists, expected that art to embody the experiences and trauma of racism, which often meant didactic figuration. A certain tradition of Black activism also considered abstract art too ingratiating to mainstream Euro- American tastes, too mute on the pressing realities of racism.[4]

The issue concerning “authenticity” and “the Black experience” is generally discussed in relation to the Black Arts Movement and its preference for images that contested the pervasive vilification, ridicule, and disparagement of African Americans in US popular culture. But the split that imagined “African American artist” as incompatible with “abstract artist” predates the Black Arts Movement by decades. As abstraction gained momentum after World War II, Black American artists were at the forefront of

 

aesthetic debates, but unlike their white counterparts, they also had to contend with an art world that saw them first as Black and second as artists. In his 1946 essay “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” Romare Bearden criticized the tendency to evaluate work by Black artists based on “sociological rather than aesthetic” criteria. Although Bearden himself worked in a more representational vein, he was acutely aware that as long as the sociological dominated the conversation, the formal innovations of both figural and abstract artists of color would continue to be dismissed.[5]

In all instances, Black representation has involved the confluence of an artist’s individual perspective or desire for personal agency with the discourse of these movements circumscribing the parameters of Blackness in art. There has been a tendency toward figuration and realism in these movements, which have operated on principles of transparency, immediacy, authority, and authenticity. These well-meaning efforts ultimately reinforced a reductive notion of “Black art,” or the idea of an essence locatable in works of art by Black artists.[6]



[1] Holland Cotter, “Energy and Abstraction at the Studio Museum in Harlem,” The New York Times, April 7, 2006.

[2] Megan O’Grady, “Once Overlooked, Black Abstract Painters Are Finally Given Their Due,” The New York Times, October 13, 2021.

[3] Dawoud Bey, “The Black Artist as Invisible (Wo)man,” High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967 – 1975. (Independent Curators International, New York, D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, New York. 2006), 103.

[4] Ben Davis, “Yes, Black Women Made Abstract Art Too, as a Resounding New Show Makes Clear,” artnet News, October 20, 2017.

[5] Spectrum: Abstraction in African American Art, 1950-1975 (Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York City). Exhibition press release.

[6] Adrienne Edwards, “Blackness in Abstraction,” Art in America Magazine, January 5, 2015.

 

 

About the Curator:

 

Dexter Wimberly is an American entrepreneur and curator based in Hayama, Japan. He’s the co-founder and CEO of the online education platform CreativeStudy. Wimberly has organized exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Prior to his curatorial career, Wimberly was the managing partner of the New York-based advertising and marketing agency August Bishop, representing a diverse array of clients including Adidas, The Coca-Cola Company, and HBO. Wimberly is also a Senior Critic at New York Academy of Art, and the founder and director of the Hayama Artist Residency.

 

About the Green Family Art Foundation:

 

The Green Family Art Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.

The foundation’s mission is to provide a venue for, make grants to museums for the benefit of, and educate others about contemporary artists we believe communicate important ideas that are relevant and discussion worthy today and in the future.

The exhibition is located at 2111 Flora Street, Suite 110, Dallas, TX 75201. Hours are Wednesday-Friday, 11am-5pm and Saturday-Sunday, 11am-6pm. Admission is free.

For press inquiries, please reach out to info@greenfamilyartfoundation.org or call 214-274-5656.

Download Press Release
Back to Past exhibitions

2111 Flora Street, Suite 110

Dallas, TX 75201

Wednesday - Friday, 11am-5pm 

Saturday - Sunday, 11am-6pm

Closed Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day

info@greenfamilyartfoundation.org

@greenfamilyartfoundation

(214) 274-5656 

Go
Instagram, opens in a new tab.
Facebook, opens in a new tab.
Join the mailing list
Manage cookies
Copyright © 2023 Green Family Art Foundation
Site by Artlogic

This website uses cookies
This site uses cookies to help make it more useful to you. Please contact us to find out more about our Cookie Policy.

Manage cookies
Accept

Cookie preferences

Check the boxes for the cookie categories you allow our site to use

Cookie options
Required for the website to function and cannot be disabled.
Improve your experience on the website by storing choices you make about how it should function.
Allow us to collect anonymous usage data in order to improve the experience on our website.
Allow us to identify our visitors so that we can offer personalised, targeted marketing.
Save preferences